Agence France-Presse,
DAMASCUS: A top North Korean official held talks in Syria on Sunday, amid reports — strongly denied by both countries — that Pyongyang was helping Damascus develop a nuclear programme.
Syrian Prime Minister Mohammed Naji Otri met Choe Thae-Bok, chairman of communist North Korea's Supreme People's Assembly and discussed efforts to boost relations between the two nations, the official SANA news agency said.
The two men spoke of the “cooperative relations and historic friendship” between their nations, it said.
The visit by Choe, who arrived in Syria on Friday, follows an Israeli air raid on Syria last month that Western media reports have said targeted a nuclear site being developed with North Korean help.
Both governments have categorically denied the allegations.
According to a New York Times report, Israeli warplanes bombed the site in northeast Syria that Israeli and US intelligence believed was a partly built nuclear reactor, possibly modelled on one in North Korea.
Citing unnamed US and foreign officials with access to the intelligence reports, the report said it appeared Israel carried out the raid on September 6 to demonstrate its determination to snuff out even a nascent nuclear project.
Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad said that the target was an “unused military building” and that the bombs hit “nothing of consequence.”
North Korea denied the reports, describing them as “a clumsy plot” designed to disrupt relations between the Washington and Pyongyang.
Britain's Sunday Times newspaper reported that the bombing raid was launched after elite Israeli commandos had seized North Korean nuclear material from the secret Syrian military site during an earlier raid.
The story was branded “totally false” by Syrian Information Minister Mohsin Bilal who dismissed the report as “the fruit of ill will”.
In Damascus, Choe also met parliament speaker Mahmud al-Abrash, and voiced North Korea's support for Syrian efforts to regain the Golan Heights, the strategic plateau captured by Israel in 1967 and annexed in 1981.
